Can’t seem to get environment mapping to work as in those nice screenshots on the terragen home page. I tried adding the bacbuff picture as a texture to the sky, but it gave a very odd looking result, with large blank bits. Do I just need to keep twiddling settings (which doesn’t seem to be working) or is there something I’m missing ?

On another, sillier note - ter2blend needs a better name. It’s kind of awkward to say, it should have a catchier name like Blendergen or Terrablend…

OK, in order to make a tru environment map with a Terragen image, you need to take 6 images from Terragen, (i.e. North, East, South, West and Straight Up and Straight Down). You then need to compile these 6 images in Photoshop or GIMP into one image and apply it to a sphere. When you make the env map for your object, it will then have a true image of the surroundings. You can ask Stefano, (S68) how to do the camera setup in Terragen, cause he did it before. I am not sure.

Only using one image will result in the background image showing up as the env map.

I think this would be stretching my abilities beyond their elastic limit… plus I don’t want to download yet another great freeware program - terragen has already diverted my attention from Blender, god knows what the Gimp would do. I’ll put terrablend (I’m not calling it ter2blend, it’s just too clumsy ! ) reflections on hold as something to do “one day”.

You don’t need to do the camera setup manually, you can automate the process with an animation script. My IBL script contains a terragen animation script to render the 6 needed images automatically, unfortunatly the included program can only be used with HDR images to directly create environment maps from, but you can still easily do it in Blender with the terragen images themselves by simply applying them as textures on the six sides of a cube. Put a sphere (or other object) in the center of the cube, then render a environment map from it. Of course you can use the cube as a background for you entire scene. The camera must be in the center of the cube (vertex parent).